Collaborative Research: Incorporating secondary foundation species in coastal restoration efforts to increase ecosystem regrowth, biodiversity recovery and climate resistance

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Ecological restoration is an important tool to combat habitat degradation, biodiversity loss, and climate change. However, ecological restoration is extremely challenging. It requires building partnerships across researchers, conservationists, and managers to co-develop, test, and refine new science-informed solutions that will improve restoration success, lower costs, and increase efficiency. Restoration in coastal systems has historically taken a single-species approach that focuses on reducing environmental stress, avoiding competition, and excluding interactions with other organisms. Previous work by the investigators is challenging this paradigm and has demonstrated that beneficial interactions among and across species are key to organismal and ecosystem resistance to the high physical stress that is common in restoration. Harnessing mutually beneficial, or positive species interactions has the potential to increase restoration yields at little or no extra cost. This project unites non-profit restoration practitioners with scientists to test and systematically incorporate mutually beneficial interactions in large-scale restoration to increase habitat growth, resistance to environmental stress, and re-establish biodiversity. This work will occur in three invaluable coastal ecosystems that have severely declined due to anthropogenic activities and therefore are the target of extensive conservation efforts – oyster reefs, salt marshes, and seagrass meadows. Results of this work will inform restoration strategies and be integrated into easy to understand training materials (e.g. step-by-step guides and workshops) that will be distributed to interested stakeholders. This work will support and train a number of conservation scientists across the research institutions and other organizations, and provide hands-on training and demonstrative case-studies of new and easy to implement restoration techniques. Foundation species, such as salt marsh grass, seagrasses, and oysters, are habitat-forming organisms that create locally stable conditions for other organisms. Secondary foundation species (SFS) are habitat-forming organisms that establish after and within a primary foundation species (PFS) that further modify and enhance ecosystem functions and structure. Inclusion of facilitation between co-occurring primary and secondary foundation species in restoration designs has the potential to increase ecosystem regrowth as well as elevate biodiversity of inhabitants and climate resistance. The overarching objective of the proposed research is to work in concert with conservation organizations to test and co-design evidence-based approaches that restore secondary foundation species to increase the growth of primary foundation species and site biodiversity, while enhancing key ecosystem functions (e.g., climate resistance of restored habitats). Specifically, this project will: 1) Test how enhancing previously restored sites with either complementary or similar SFS at both low and high abundances affects PFS growth, local biodiversity, and key ecosystem functions, 2) Co-restore PFS with either complementary or similar SFS at both low and high abundances in a fully-factorial experiment to test for the relative ability to increase PFS growth, local biodiversity, and important ecosystem functions in newly restored systems, and 3) Survey previously restored habitats and reference sites to quantify and correlate SFS abundance and complementarity with changes in PFS abundance, local biodiversity and ecosystem function to test the generality of SFS effects.This project is being supported via a joint program involving the Divisions of Environmental Biology and Integrative Organismal Systems and the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.